


Field Guide to North American Dragons

by PacificRimbaud



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Accidental Drug Use, Bromance, Cigarettes, Depression, Gen, Hallucinations, Hallucinogens, Healing, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Male Friendship, Native American/First Nations Deities, Native American/First Nations Legends & Lore, Research, Road Trips, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24309424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PacificRimbaud/pseuds/PacificRimbaud
Summary: Draco Malfoy never asked for Charlie Weasley, a flying car, or fuckingAmerica, for that matter.But sometimes what you don't want is exactly what you need.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy & Charlie Weasley
Comments: 31
Kudos: 93
Collections: 2020 DBQ Round Three: Astronomy





	Field Guide to North American Dragons

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [TheSlytherinCabal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSlytherinCabal/pseuds/TheSlytherinCabal) in the [DBQ2020Round3](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DBQ2020Round3) collection. 



> "Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me but are the property of J.K.R. and Warner Bros. No copyright infringement is intended. The theme for this round of the competition was Astronomy and my chosen pairing was Draco Malfoy & Charlie Weasley. Comments/Reviews are encouraged by The Slytherin Cabal's Admin Team on all stories in Death By Quill, but comments left by readers are set to be moderated by story authors until the end of the competition in order to protect participants' anonymity. Thank you to my beta for their time and help."

“Draco? Where the fuck are you? I’ve brought Chinese.”

Pansy finds him lying on his belly on the floor of the nearly empty third guest room on the first floor of the East Wing, balancing his 2,596th match.

“I’ve brought you dumplings." A plastic takeout sack dangles from her elbow. "We have pork and radish, spinach vegetable, and the chicken and mushroom pies you like." She looks around the room. "What the fuck are you doing?”

"This?" He indicates the line of standing matches snaking over the floor, under a wingback chair, past the curtains and to a conical mound of clipped match heads beside a tapestry. “It's a domino run. With a volcano at the end."

"Made of matches?"

Draco drags on the cigarette hanging from his lower lip. "I see we understand each other."

Pansy blinks. "Do you intend to light it?"

"Of course."

"You should have Flooed.”

“For dim sum?”

“Were you planning to leave once you’d lit the place on fire, or stay for the whole show?” She leans down and sniffs. “Gods. You smell like ethanol and arse. Get up.”

“I don’t want to get up.” He rolls over. The backs of his eyeballs feel abraded. Once the room stops spinning, he gives Pansy what he believes is a sensual look. "You should come down here."

“My vagina isn’t going to solve this problem. Anyway, I’m seeing someone. You know I'm single occupancy.”

A flake of ash falls onto his cheek. “Since when?” He narrows his eyes. “Does he do oral as well as me?”

“He’s breathtaking.” She looks around the room. “Do you have any shoes in here, or are you going barefoot?”

“Going where?”

* * *

“Name?”

The mediwitch is jowly and stern and Draco wants his fucking cigarettes.

“Draco Lucius—” Pansy perches on the front of the chair beside him.

“Fuck Lucius,” says Draco.

“Draco Fuck Lucius Malfoy.” Pansy crosses her legs and leans back.

“Age?” The mediwitch is all business.

“He’s twenty.”

“Admitting for?”

“A shower. He’s been drunk for at least a week and I found him trying to light his house on fire.”

The witch checks off a series of boxes on a parchment, and hands a clipboard over to Draco.

“Sign here. Wand?”

Draco rests his head in his hand while he signs. “I believe I dropped it in the fountain on the south lawn.”

* * *

He stays in a private room in St. Mungo’s for six days.

He leaves sober, with a month’s worth of antidepressant potions in one hand and a reminder card for a therapy appointment in the other.

Pansy pulls his wand out of her handbag. “Light your cigarettes with this. Arse.”

* * *

“What brings you here?”

The therapist is American and her office smells of eucalyptus.

It's beastly.

Draco leans back on her chaise and looks up through the leaves of a fern. Her enchanted ceiling shows a blue sky dotted with indolent cumulus clouds.

He sighs. “There was going to be a _volcano_.”

* * *

His therapist wears bangle bracelets and sees him once each week.

Her name is Sandra.

Draco grimaces. “A _job?_ ”

“Paid or volunteer. It’s up to you. The idea is to engage. Gain a sense of purpose. Boost your self-esteem.”

“My _what?_ ”

“You aren’t your parents’ mistakes, Draco.”

His throat abruptly hurts.

He swallows.

* * *

“Question one: I would rather be a Magizoologist or a journalist.” Pansy leans against the table by the window in the ground floor sitting room of the Manor and blows on her tea.

“That’s a statement, not a question.” Draco rolls over on the sofa and punches at the throw pillow under his head.

“Question two: I would rather be an Auror or play the lute.”

“I’d rather shove this questionnaire up my own arse.”

“You're welcome to, or shall I take it for you? I’ll have you mucking Thestral stalls.”

“Do what you like.”

“Play . . . the . . . lute.”

He puts the pillow over his head to block out the scratching of her quill.

* * *

“What’s this?” Draco takes the roll of parchment Pansy offers.

“Your new job.”

All that’s written on it is an address in London.

“What is it?” he asks.

“You said you wanted out of England for a while. I’ve asked a favor of someone—”

“Your vagina tenant. Don’t deny it.”

“I’ve asked a favor of someone very close to me. And it is a fucking favor. I’m sure you’ll hate it.”

“Perfect.” He rolls the parchment up. “There is no way that prick is better at oral.”

“He’s unrivaled.”

“ _Prick._ ”

* * *

“What is all this?” Draco steps over one of a dozen canvas duffel bags agape on the floor with orderly rows of equipment beside them. 

The git holding the door open is a Weasley. One of the older ones.

His ginger hair is tied up in a bun. He has eyes like Draco’s therapist’s ceiling, and his arms are scarred and freckled, colored with sun-faded tattoos.

He's called Charlie, which is one of those ghastly we've-only-just-met-and-we're-already-friends sort of names.

“It's primarily an equipment staging area.” Charlie shuts the door. “Cuppa?” 

“What is it that I'll be doing?”

“Right to it. Are you good with astronomy?”

Draco narrows his eyes. “Why?”

* * *

“Arizona! With Charlie fucking Weasley! He wears his hair in a _bun!”_

Pansy leans out of her second story window. “Shh! You’ll wake the whole street.”

“Your Floo’s locked. Is the oralist up there?”

Pansy speaks to someone in the room behind her. “He’ll go in a moment. No, don’t put your trousers on.” She turns back to Draco. “Arizona will be lovely in October.”

“What the _fuck_ is an Arizona, Pansy?”

* * *

“Why do you need to have a celestial navigator to catch a snake?”

Draco turns the flat brass discs of an astrolabe over in his hands.

"Not catch. Observe." Charlie zips a duffel bag. "Great Horned Serpents are enormous, profoundly magical beings. They're half in and half out of our dimension, and if we're able to get close enough to them while they're gathering, the terrestrial plane—" He thinks. "It may wobble."

"But the stars won’t." Draco holds up the astrolabe.

"Exactly."

* * *

"Is that what you're wearing?"

Draco looks down.

Black wool trousers. Black dress shirt. Black cap-toe Oxfords.

He's forgone the tie, and his cuff-links are casual.

"Yes."

"The entire time?"

"Yes."

Charlie, in a white cotton t-shirt and grey canvas shorts, shrugs. “This is a one-way. We’ll pick up another Portkey on the other side when we’re done.” He holds out what looks like a pint glass. It _is_ a pint glass. "Any feelings about car versus horse?”

Draco pulls his hand back. “Pardon?”

* * *

According to Charlie it’s called a 1957 Ford Thunderbird convertible. It’s a lacquered, lurid red, like a cocktail cherry. Draco doesn’t ask about the legality of the flying charm. It’s America. Charlie is a Weasley. As far as Draco can tell there are no rules for either.

The air in America is desiccating, and Draco develops a headache.

"Drink some water." Charlie reaches under the driver’s seat and hands him a plastic Muggle water bottle with a wide screw-on lid and a sticker that reads "Chillin’".

Draco drains the bottle, then places a sticking charm on the brass ring attached to the edge of the astrolabe and hangs it from the rear view mirror. It swings back and forth as Charlie steers the car, wheels brushing over the tops of parched desert shrubs, toward the thin crescent moon in the western sky.

* * *

“How are you getting along in that bloody great house by yourself?” Charlie prods manfully at two portions of steak on the grill outside their tent.

Sitting in an aluminum folding chair, Draco opens one of Charlie’s anemic Mexican beers.

The polite gloss of “Alright,” sits at the ready in his mouth. Bafflingly, as though Charlie were wearing bangles and kept potted ferns, he says, “I’m lonely.”

Charlie looks up at him. “I would be, too.”

* * *

They share a tent, one cot at each end.

Draco obsessively casts wards against scorpions, but each night he falls asleep instantly, and remains so until morning, for the first time in more years than he can count.

* * *

There are no maps for the breeding grounds. What they have is a body of correspondence between Charlie and the Tohono O'odham wizards who have given him permission and a generous grant to do observational research on their ancestral lands. There are anecdotes and histories on rolls of parchment that Charlie reads while he drives.

They travel west for days, winding at fifteen kilometres per hour through fields of cacti with their arms held up at ninety degree angles like victims of a bank robbery.

Charlie stops the car and stares at a line of mountains in the distance, purple as a day-old bruise, then scrubs a hand in his beard.

They go north.

* * *

"Frankly, that's overkill." Draco points the neck of a bottle of Dos Equis at the sky, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with stars.

Charlie's hair is braided, like a Viking. "You know your constellation?”

"Of course I do."

It looks different in a saturated field of celestial objects. More brilliant and less significant at the same time.

"Eltanin, Rastaban, Thuban." Charlie points, rattling off the bright stars in Draco. "The great spermatozoon of the night sky."

Draco coughs on a mouthful of lager. "The _fuck_?"

Charlie laughs constantly. Like it’s not complicated for him.

* * *

Draco props his feet on the dash.

Ten yards away, Charlie stands on the dome of a red rock, looking for marks and disturbances.

He shakes his head. For the first time in two weeks of searching, he’s frustrated.

He looks back over his shoulder. “You want to go swimming?”

Draco lifts his black-rimmed Muggle sunglasses. “What?” 

* * *

In Why, Arizona, Population: 116 they take rooms in a Muggle motel.

Charlie does leisurely laps in the blue-tiled, rust-streaked swimming pool while Draco stretches out on a lounge chair and chain smokes under a cooling charm.

After dark they eat delivery pizza with a thin, dry crust, then Charlie walks to the bar next door to play pool.

There’s a short shelf of Muggle VHS tapes in the motel office.

Draco reads the back of _Dune_.

“You a vampire?”

He looks up.

The young woman at the front desk wears her ponytail eye-wateringly tight.

He considers himself: white skin, black trousers, black shirt, black shoes, black sunglasses still on, like a comfort object.

He tucks _Dune_ under his arm.

“Yes, I am.”

* * *

When they find the first clear and unmistakable sign of the serpents' migration, Charlie Weasley laughs.

He shouts.

He smiles with all his teeth.

He wraps his arms around Draco and squeezes him.

Draco lifts his own thin, white hand, and pats him between the shoulder blades twice with his open palm.

_Pat pat._

Like that.

* * *

"So that’s—"

"That's shit, yes."

"I didn't realize snakes did that."

"Everything shits."

"Not like that, they don't."

"Yeah. That's—" Charlie nods philosophically. "They're really big snakes."

* * *

Clinging to the red rocks at the base of a craggy hill they find translucent, fragile flakes of snake skin the size of hubcaps.

Charlie spreads them out beside the instruments from his bags. He looks through lenses and measures with calipers, runs tests with his wand and drips potions on samples of skin. 

“Oh,” he says.

“Oh?”

Charlie looks up. His irises are a vanishing line of blue around vast black pupils.

“I’ve been told this, but—yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“There’s been speculation about a symbiotic relationship between the snakes and an unknown dermal fungus that may produce tryptamine compounds with psychoactive effects. It’s likely a complex anti-predator adaptation.” He nods, affirming a thought. “So not only does their magic disrupt the perceived physical environment, but disseminating a hallucinogen impacts the cognitive organizational capacities of potential pursuers—”

Draco stares. “You’re high.”

“Very much so, yes.”

“Don’t touch me.”

* * *

“You have”—Charlie waves his hand in a circle from the passenger seat—”this sense of sadness about you.”

Draco holds the wheel of the Thunderbird steady with one knee while he opens a bag of Funyuns.

“But you’re dust. And _I’m_ dust.” Charlie lays a hand over his chest. “We’re the dust of the cosmos, come together in this moment to form bodies—” he rubs his own forearms appreciatively “—which have _magic_ inside them. It’s a miracle. _I’m_ a miracle. _You’re_ a miracle.” His eyes drop halfway closed in the moonlight. He reaches out and softly squeezes Draco's earlobe. “I love you, miracle.”

“Cheers.” Draco tips his bag of Funyuns at Charlie.

“Do you know how to drive?”

“I do now.”

With the headlights off, Draco follows a trail of ghostlike sheets of snakeskin clinging to the rocks.

* * *

“When we get close enough to the sandworms—”

“The serpents.” Charlie, mostly sober, steers the Thunderbird over a dry arroyo.

“—the serpents.” Draco recrosses his ankles on the dash. “What, exactly, is going to happen?”

"I expect it will become impossible to use landscape cues to navigate."

"And the fungus?"

"I believe you have to have direct contact."

"You believe?"

"Yes."

"If you get me high in the middle of the desert—"

"I'm eighty percent certain that's not going to happen."

* * *

Charlie thinks they're still miles away when the ground starts to undulate.

The mountains slip and warp along the edge of the horizon, the dials on the Thunderbird twitch and spin erratically, and Draco becomes seasick on land.

"Extraordinary." Charlie stops the car every half hour to take notes.

The evidence of the snakes’ migration points east.

Draco breathes through his nostrils, aligns the discs of his astrolabe to Mercury, Venus, and Saturn, to Polaris and Mirfak and Schedar, and they drive.

* * *

“Listen.”

Charlie stops the car.

The breast of the Pinaleño Mountains swells and subsides like a breathing beast, and in the dry, crackling dark of the desert valley, there are sounds.

Coyotes gossip in linguistic yips and barks, loud over the chuckling, whispering and clacking of birds and the scrapes and shuffles of four-legged animals browsing under rocks.

An owl, repetitive and asthmatic, hoots close to the ground, and at the lowest end, just within hearing, evening bees disrupt the air with their wings.

Sifting through and surrounding it all, they hear a slipping susurrus.

“What time is it?” Charlie asks.

Draco finds the time on his astrolabe. “It’s ten o’clock. We should make camp.”

“Alright.” Charlie’s eyes glint in the white light of the waxing moon.

Draco sighs. “One hour. We’ll hike one hour, then it’s back here, trying to make the tent stick to the ground.”

* * *

They cast spells: Disillusionment, sound dampening, wards against animals that sting and bite and scratch, spells to cover their scents.

“Hold still.” Charlie points his wand. “ _Oculus Lucidentium._ ”

Draco blinks his eyes. “What the fuck was that?”

“Night vision. You hiking in those?” He points at Draco’s Oxfords.

Draco drinks in the desert, bright as day. “Of course I am.”

They move like phantoms in the dark, soundless, troubling nothing, troubled by nothing.

Draco walks with his hands in his pockets, and Charlie carries the backpack.

“Hold on, I’ve got another rock in my shoe.” Draco stops. “I said hold on, Weasley. If I’m lost out here with just my wand—”

Charlie, scaling the top of a low ridge, doesn’t hear, or doesn’t care, and goes on, fast and determined.

He crouches at the top.

Bathed in moonlight, he smiles.

Draco scrambles to the peak of the ridge, kneels, and looks down.

At the bottom of a steep drop lies a spring, brilliant blue in the too-bright light of the moon. Ridges and creviced rocks rise around it in a ring, and on its shores are the twisting and writhing bodies of colossal snakes.

The tops of their skins are pearlescent grey-green, their underbellies orange. They're fifteen meters long, turning and coiling around one another, their sliding skins and constant hissing as loud as desert birds.

Shining black horns sweep back from their heads, and each has a luminous carnelian-yellow jewel between its eyes. 

Draco turns to Charlie. “You said they were nesting.”

“I never said nesting. Snakes don’t nest.” Charlie's brow wrinkles. “With the exception of—”

“What exactly are they doing, then?”

“They’re mating.”

Draco stares at Charlie. At the astrolabe in his hand. The ground beneath them twists and groans and quivers, and he lowers his fingertips to steady himself.

“They’re fucking.”

Charlie smiles, broad and easy. “Exactly, yes.”

Draco rubs his hand over his eyes. “What the fuck, Pansy?”

* * *

Halfway back to the car, Draco stops.

“Alright, mate?” Charlie asks.

Draco looks at Charlie, then down at his hands. “Are you feeling this?”

“You didn’t touch anything after you touched the ground, did you? Mouth? Eyes?”

“I did do that, yes.”

“Fuck.”

“Fuck.”

* * *

“They’re so fucking beautiful.” Stretched out on the hood of the Thunderbird, Draco swallows a mouthful of Dos Equis, and spreads his hand against the stars. “There are a billion, billion, billion of them.” He turns to Charlie, sitting beside him. “Do you know Draco?”

“Yeah, mate.” Charlie pats Draco’s thigh. “I know Draco.”

“It’s a dragon. Only it looks like a sperm.” Draco smooths his hand over his own leg. “Black pants. I’m a vampire.”

“Another taco?”

Draco shakes his head emphatically. “No. I’m very full.”

The stars in their billions ripple, blink and swirl, animated by inner mechanisms invisible to Draco before now. His eyes are open, as wide as can be, and he absorbs the motion of the eternal cosmos.

“Rastaban, Eltanin, Thuban.” Draco traces over the stars of his constellation with his fingertip.

He pats Charlie’s knee with his open palm. _Pat pat._ “You found your fucking snakes.”

“ _We_ found _our_ fucking snakes.” Charlie clinks the shoulder of his beer bottle against Draco’s.

“They’re your snakes. I’m only here to hold the astrolabe.”

“They’re their own snakes, I suppose. That one is all yours, though.” Charlie points at the constellation Draco.

A pale line of light sprints across the field of stars, leaving a trail that burns for minutes.

It happens again.

And once more.

“You said it was a sperm,” says Draco morosely.

Charlie laughs. “I’m sorry. I was pulling your leg. It’s a dragon-serpent. Very noble. Ladon in the Garden of the Hesperides, guarding the golden apples.”

“Slain by Heracles.”

Charlie leans back. “And yet here you are.”

Draco rolls his head toward Charlie. He’s relaxed and at ease, his Viking braids pulled up in a bun, his Viking beard filling in nicely. His eyes are like Sandra’s sky, only warmer, clearer, pure and still as an undisturbed mountain lake, vivid and constant as the stars.

 _Oh, gods, the stars,_ thinks Draco, and he turns to see them again, meteors streaming across the dark in bands of glittering white. The constellation Draco burns with them—it is Ladon, its life spilling from the wounds of Heracles' sword, only it lives still, writhing in the sky, the body of a snake making love, making life.

Draco turns again to Charlie and points his beer at Ladon in the sky, incandescent and exultant. “I am made of light.”

Charlie nods. “Absolutely.”

Charlie himself gleams gold. He is an apple of the Garden of the Hesperides, he is Apollo, he is Helios, he is the sun lighting the face of the moon. 

“And you are, too,” says Draco, marveling.

“Too right.”

“I have not been slain.”

“Nope.”

Draco peers into the glistering multitude of the heavens, diamonds crowning the purple and shimmering mountains, wreathing the heaving skin of the Earth.

“I am not my parents’ mistakes.”

Something hot and wet escapes Draco’s eyes and drips over his chin. He lifts a hand to his face, and when he pulls it back, his fingers are damp.

He shows Charlie. “What the fuck is this?”

“You’re alright.” Charlie takes Draco's hand in his.

Draco looks between them.

His hand is white as a vampire’s.

Charlie’s shines, rough and bronzed.

“What are you doing?” Draco asks.

When Charlie squeezes his fingers around the back of Draco’s hand, Draco’s eyes are an arroyo after a thunderstorm, flooding down his cheeks and onto his black button up shirt.

“You’ll get through this.”

Draco clutches his hand.

“Will I?”

“Yeah. You don’t have to live in that shithole. Get a flat or something. Start fresh.”

“Fresh.”

“Fresh as anything. Anywhere you’d like.” Charlie sips his beer.

“But we’ll stay here a while. With the fucking snakes.”

Charlie nods. “They’ll mate, then I expect they’ll hibernate.” 

Draco looks at their hands again. “Apart from Pansy, no one’s ever held my hand.”

Charlie laughs. “Now someone has.”

“We’re not having sex. That’s not what this is.”

“Not in the slightest.”

“The snakes are, though.”

“Yeah.” Charlie sounds serene. “They are.”

“You’re a miracle, Charlie.”

“So are you.”

* * *

The ceiling in Sandra’s office is a sorbet-colored sunset.

“What was that like for you, working in Dragonology?”

Draco smooths one tanned hand over the placket of his white button up shirt.

“Have you ever seen _Dune?_ ”


End file.
